I caught the last half of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels explaining his new budget math to CNN’s Candy Crowley.  Daniels is trying to pitch himself and his book with the idea that the federal deficits and long-run debt pose an existential threat to the Republic. It’s just arithmetic, he says.  But which numbers matter?

Math can be hard, but it’s impossible for those who ignore the relevant numbers.  The essential numbers (among dozens we could cite) are these:

First:  The US Government can currently borrow money for 10 years at about 1.8 percent, which adjusted for inflation means that the real cost of borrowing money long term is essentially zero.  The market is screaming at us that money is free if we want to borrow more to put people back to work doing stuff that needs to be done.

Second, with unemployment at 9 to 17 percent, depending on what you measure, there are about 25 million people who need jobs or more hours in the jobs they have.  Smart economists told us early on, and more are telling us now that this condition could last for several more years.  And that’s assuming we don’t slip into a worse depression, which we might because Europe is led by people as dumb as Mitch Daniels.  So even the “better” proposals to spend a little more now and postpone austerity measures until 2013 are misguided.

Third, the deteriorating infrastructure in the United States needs over $2 trillion in investments over the next decade, starting yesterday.  Again, it costs us essentially nothing to borrow the money to do this.

Fourth, US poverty rates are at record levels.  There are about 50 million people without health insurance. The number of children in the US who rely on food stamps is shameful and scandalous.

Fifth, the richest 1 percent in America continue to capture a grossly disproportionate share of the nation’s income and wealth, and that trend is continuing.  But their effective tax rates haven’t been lower in decades.

Sixth, we’re laying off tens of thousands of teachers.  It is because we have too many teachers?  Too many  over-educated children?  No, we need more and we need to pay our teachers better.  Our schools are failing, our kids are falling behind those of other nations and we’re losing out in the competition for what we need the next generation to know.  That’s called losing the future.

And on and on.  But Mitch Daniels didn’t bother to repeat any of those numbers.  Instead, he claimed that just the interest payments on debt alone would force us to stop educating our children, which is patently absurd.  He then claimed that historically, when countries reach a certain threshold of debt, they fail.  But he didn’t say what that threshold is or cite any examples from history — he’s probably just misreading Reinhardt, as the GOP tends to do — nor explain why he believes the US is even remotely close to such a threshold when it’s clearly not.  Once again, the government’s 10 year interest rate is around 1.8 percent . . .

Daniels is the “moderate” Republican that gets people like George Will all excited, because, I assume, he thinks Daniels at least has some tenuous grasp of reality while most of the presidential wanna bees don’t.  Nope.  Stick to baseball, George, where the statistics are there for all to see.

You would think that a sentient President of the United States would be embarrassed, ashamed, and contrite after one of the more mindless and destructive governmental performances in years. Nope. Not the President who foolishly believes the federal government needs to tighten its belt because he’s clueless about the difference between families and the federal government. Has there ever been a Democratic President more befuddled about what leadership requires?

Having locked his own DemaPod Party into voting to slash $38 billion for their own programs, Mr. Obama didn’t apologize. Instead he thought it was a moment to make another speech urging you to visit the Washington Monument, as though he were George Bush telling you to visit Disneyland. Why anyone would want to watch this spectacle of a government and party betraying their followers and making fools of themselves from the top of the Washington Monument escapes me.

This President owes an explanation to the American people why, at a time when the nation’s critical needs are going unmet at both the federal and state levels, when 50 million people are without health insurance, record numbers in poverty, 14 million people are unemployed — millions for more than a year — and Governors are balancing their budgets on the backs of teachers, firemen, police, health and safety workers, etc, he thinks the right policy is to slash federal spending even though the wealthiest Americans control 40 percent of the wealth and just got hundreds of billions in tax cut gifts.

It is wrong, stupid, cruel, mindless. In short, it’s a mistake. [As Dean Baker reminds us,] Moody’s Mark Zandi just explained that giving the Zombies what they demand would cost up to 700,000 jobs. So if you give them 2/3 of that now, we’ll lose about 465,000 jobs just this round. Yet Obama did not bother to contradict Mr. Boehner, who told the media this package will “help create a better environment for job creators.” In which alternate universe? Is anyone watching Ireland, Portugal, the UK, where these same austerity policies are hurting their economies?

The final vote in favor of setting this travesty in motion was overwhelming, indicating the degree to which Pods and Zombies now control our government. Of course, the richest individuals and corporations walked away from this zombie feeding unscathed.

Worse, Obama and the DemoPods foolishly maneuvered themselves into providing more than enough votes for the “largest spending cuts” in our history just so the 40 or so craziest Tea-GOP zombies could vote still “no.”

That neat trick means the Tea-GOP zombies can avoid responsibility for the dirty work the Obama DemoPods just performed on their own base, but not offend their own zombie base. Then they can come back in the next round, only a month away to demand even more insane cuts than last night’s.

And if you care about the “leadership” imagery, John Boehner just made Barack Obama look like a helpless fool. Boehner will get a few dumb primary threats, but he’s got two more rounds of this to feed the Zombies and he’s perfectly positioned for that.

Worse, Boehner will receive kudos from the Village for getting more than he first demanded and more than he ever expected, at zero cost to his party, while getting credit for being what passes for an “adult” in our nation’s captial. Gosh, he’s not at all like the Zombies whose agenda he just furthered.

“Compromise” is what the polls said Democratic voters wanted, but where are the compromises with the elements voters wanted in the deal? Repeal tax breaks on the rich? Make GE and their ilk pay their share of taxes? Tax the banksters for their casino games? Stop fighting needless wars? Never even considered.

Instead, the “compromise” consisted of the DemoPods giving the Tea-GOP Zombies 2/3 of what they demanded in this hostage feeding, instead of 3/3. But the Zombies still hold the hostages, because this will all replay on the debt limit debate a month from now, when Obama leads the DemoPods to feed the Zombies again.

You really have to wonder how many real people becoming DemoPods it will take before the last human Democrats wake up screaming that Barack Obama is destroying the Party and hurting the country. How much destruction will it take for them to stand up and say, “enough! I won’t let you lead us over the cliff again.”

David Dayen provides a thorough survey of the wreckage and what it means. More human casualty lists are in the New York Times.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu spoke to a Christian Science Monitor event yesterday and was asked why the Obama Administration was willing to propose/accept major cuts in LIHEAP, the Low Income Home Energy Assistant Program, for fiscal year 2012. His response suggests the Administration does not have a principled or coherent answer.

The CSM story with video is here. Sam Stein at HuffPo captures part of the contradiction in Adminstration policy but doesn’t discuss the more blatant absurdity of Chu’s respsonse: [my bold]

. . . Chu acknowledged that the administration had made “very, very hard decisions” in proposing to decrease funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program by $2.5 billion in its 2012 budget. But while President Barack Obama argued in February that lower commodity prices meant less aid was necessary, a subsequent spike has led the administration to reassess its approach to justifying the new funding levels.

On Friday, Chu argued that the administration was pursuing alternate, broader reforms to help stabilize energy prices for households.

Sorry, but what follows from Chu is all total nonsense. LIHEAP is a program for providing block grants to states (you know, flexible things Republicans like when the Feds try to dictate programs) to help people lower their energy bills.

One of the main features is direct payments to low-income people to pay for heating oil and/or utility bills when energy prices are particularly high and/or weather is severe. It’s to keep low-income people from having to choose between freezing to death and starving to death. From the Health and Human Services, Children and Families, LIHEAP web site: (my bold)

Contingency Funds: The President may release these funds to assist with the home energy needs arising from an emergency situation. They may be allocated to one or more grantees, or to all grantees, based on criteria appropriate to the nature of the emergency. In the past, the President generally has released these funds in response to emergency situations arising from extreme weather conditions or energy price increases. Generally, funds have been distributed based on the degree to which specific States are affected by the weather or energy price situation that led to the release of contingency funds.

As the CSM reporter noted in his question, the Administration claimed fuel prices were down last year, so let’s cut funding for next year. Except we just had a very severe winter and oil-related prices have spiked. That means people who rely on types of fuel oil for heating are hurting and could again next winter. So the Administration rationale didn’t make sense then, and doesn’t make sense now.

But it gets worse. As Stein’s HuffPo article notes, Secretary Chu then talked about a different rationale — in a time of austerity, Chu tells us in the video, the federal government needs to cut the funding, but it also wants to expand the leverage of federal dollars while extending weatherization assistance to middle-income people. Uh, no, Mr. Secretary. In a severe recession, the federal governement should be expanding safety net programs, not contracting them.

Now there’s nothing wrong with using federal dollars to leverage local and personal investments in weatherization of existing homes and rental units. The California Energy Commission started pushing that, uh, about 30 years ago. Welcome aboard, Mr. Secretary. But what has this to do with keeping poor people from freezing or starving next winter? Nada, zilch. Zero.

In case the Administration has forgotten, there are still 14 million people unemployed and another 10 million underemployed. We have record poverty in the US and worse income maldistribution than Egypt. Poor people aren’t borrowing money from friendly Bank of America to make weatherization retrofits in their (likely) badly maintained rental units, and neither are their landlords, because, you know, landlords don’t pay the utility bills and renters don’t get the benefits of retrofits they paid for after they leave.

We’ve understood this market failure problem for decades. So I don’t know what Chu thinks the feds are leveraging that will help matters soon. And utility bills are about electricity and natural gas, not just heating oil in areas, such as the Northeast, that use oil for heating. People who have lost jobs and health insurance need help paying their electricity bills, including their natural gas bills if they have gas heating — and they need it even when natural gas prices are historically low. It’s not just about home heating oil and Libya.

So if the US DOE wants to tackle the broader problem of America spending way too much money on energy because the housing stock leaks energy like a sieve, and many state building codes are negligent about energy, that’s fine. Go get ‘em. I agree it makes sense to do about a gillion cost-effective things on the demand side, including weatherization loans and leveraging federal dollars.

But first they need to make sure people don’t freeze while the Department of Energy relearns 30 years of history and takes however long it takes to set up institutions to handle loans, convinces utilities and state utilities commissions to fund energy audits and retrofits, develops community organizations to help get the word out and assist renters — something like ACORN sounds like a really good idea — and makes sure the weatherization contractors aren’t scam artists and the bank lenders don’t behave like, well, the mortgage lenders at Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America.

But the last thing this effort needs is for a Nobel laureate wasting his time fronting for a bunch of White House spin masters trying to tell us the problems the US is facing require fiscal austerity. And he certainly shouldn’t be covering up for a President who can’t admit his policy judgments and rationales are not credible.